Strategic thinking enables you to identify smarter ways of achieving goals - for yourself or for your organisation. During strategic planning, it generates unique business insights and opportunities to create competitive advantage.
The Chamber supports strategic thinking for enterprises by providing access to good practice information, linking members to experts and hosting learning events.
Strategic thinking can be done individually, as well as collaboratively among key people who can positively alter an organization's future. Group strategic thinking may create more value by enabling a proactive and creative dialogue, where individuals gain other people's perspectives on critical and complex issues. This is regarded as a benefit in highly competitive and fast-changing business landscapes.
Henry Mintzberg wrote in 1994 that strategic thinking is more about synthesis (i.e., "connecting the dots") than analysis (i.e., "finding the dots"). It is about "capturing what the manager learns from all sources (both the soft insights from his or her personal experiences and the experiences of others throughout the organization and the hard data from market research and the like) and then synthesizing that learning into a vision of the direction that the business should pursue."
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_thinking)
